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A separatist group of artificial intelligence Researchers have secured a record first round of funding for a new start-up dedicated to general-purpose artificial intelligence, marking the latest attempt to create an organization to ensure the security of the world’s most powerful technology. ‘age.
The group has split from OpenAI, an organization founded with the support of Elon Musk in 2015 to make sure superintelligent artificial intelligence systems don’t work one day and hurt those responsible. According to two people familiar with the split, the schism followed the differences with respect to the group’s leadership after Microsoft took a major $ 1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.
The new company, Anthropic, is led by Dario Amodei, one of the founders of OpenAI and former head of AI security for the organization. That has raised $ 124 million in its first round of funding. This is the highest for an artificial intelligence group trying to build a generally applicable artificial intelligence technology, rather than a format for applying the technology to a specific industry, according to research firm PitchBook . Based on figures revealed at a company presentation, the round values Anthropic at $ 845 million.
The investment was led by Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian computer scientist behind Skype. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, have also supported the company.
The rupture of OpenAI began with the departure of Amodei in December and has since grown to include about 14 researchers, according to one estimate. They include Amodei’s sister, Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, as well as a group of researchers who worked on GPT-3, OpenAI’s advance automatic language system, including Jared Kaplan, Amanda Askell, Tom Henighan, Jack Clark and Sam McCandlish.
OpenAI changed course two years ago when it sought Microsoft’s support to fuel its growing hunger for computer resources to fuel its deep learning systems. In return, he promised the software company the first rights to commercialize his discoveries.
“They started non-profit, to democratize AI,” said Oren Etzioni, head of the AI institute founded by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. “Obviously, when you get $ 1 billion, you have to make a return. I think his career has become more corporate.
OpenAI has attempted to isolate its AI security research from its new business operations by limiting Microsoft’s presence on its board. However, this still caused internal tensions over the direction and priorities of the organization, according to a person familiar with the separatist group.
OpenAI declined to comment on whether the disagreement over the direction of the investigation had led to the split, but said it had made internal changes to more closely integrate its research and security work when Amodei left.
Microsoft obtained exclusive rights to take advantage of the results of the OpenAI investigation later committing $ 1 billion to support the group, much in the form of technology to support their computer-intensive deep learning systems, including GPT-3. Earlier in the week, Microsoft said it had embedded the language system in some of its software creation tools so that people without coding skills could create their own applications.
The rush to market quickly GPT-3 contrasts with OpenAI’s handling of an earlier version of the technology, developed in 2019. The group initially said it would not publish technical details on the progress out of concern about the possible misuse of the powerful language system, although it later went reverse course.
To isolate itself from commercial interference, Anthropic has registered as a public utility corporation, or “corpus B”, with special government arrangements to protect its mission of “responsibly developing and maintaining advanced AI in benefit of humanity “. These include the creation of a long-term benefits committee made up of people who have no relationship with the company or its sponsors, and who will have the final say on issues such as the composition of their board.
Anthropic said his work will focus on “large-scale artificial intelligence models,” including the possibility of systems being easier to interpret and “building ways to more closely integrate human feedback into development.” and the deployment of these systems “.
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